The notion of Montblanc as a watch manufacturer has now been around long enough that most of us have gotten used to the idea – I think, on that issue, that there are always going to be those who object on philosophical grounds, but there are some hearts and minds you're never going to win no matter how hard you try. The fact remains, however, that Montblanc has indeed been primarily a maker of writing instruments for most of its history, and that aspect of the company is one that most of us who know Montblanc as a watch manufacturer, may not know as well.

My first Montblanc was a grad school graduation gift from my wife – a Meisterstück 149, which is as iconic a pen in the world of writing instruments, as, say, the Royal Oak or Submariner are in the world of watches or a 911 in the automotive realm. The only time it's been out of sight is when I was careless enough to drop it, uncapped, a meter and a half onto asphalt; it landed point down, and the nib got badly bent. Montblanc's New York boutique sent it back to Hamburg for repair and I got it back in a week, working just fine, no charge (watch companies, take note). I suppose I ought to admit that at one point I had about sixty vintage and modern pens, which eventually struck me as excessive, and I de-acquisitioned most of them, but I still have the 149. After carrying it for most of my working life, it, and I, returned to its birthplace, in Hamburg, Germany, to visit the Montblanc nib-making factory as well as the Montblanc Museum.

The Pen That Became A Brand

Montblanc's history goes back to, roughly, the beginning of the history of the modern fountain pen itself. Fountain pens as they exist today, first started to appear towards the end of the 19th century and really began to take off in the early 20th; all fountain pens share certain basic characteristics. First, they all use water soluble, water based inks (you can ruin a fountain pen by filling it with the wrong ink). Second, they all have a reservoir for the ink, which can be the barrel of the pen itself, or a flexible rubber sac; nowadays the majority of fountain pens use disposable ink cartridges (which purist pen enthusiasts tend to look down on a bit). There have been, over the last century, a wide range of filling systems as well, including lever, piston, so-called "touch-down" and snorkel filling systems, and so on. Third, they all have a nib – this is the flexible metal tip, which has a tiny slit down its centerline.

A fountain pen relies on capillary action to work – this is the tendency of liquids to flow through narrow spaces thanks to adhesion between the fluid, and the wall of the narrow space through which it flows. More expensive fountain pens have nibs made of 18k or 14k gold, and the point is generally tipped with a tiny ball made of an alloy of one of the platinum group metals (osmium, iridium, and ruthenium are all in the platinum group) otherwise the tip would wear away very quickly.

There were precursors to the modern fountain pen that had certain elements of what we know as the fountain pen today, but it wasn't until the late 1880s that recognizably modern fountain pens began to appear. In the beginning, they were generally just simple tubes (usually made of vulcanized rubber) which could be filled with an eyedropper; by the turn of the century, however, the development of filling systems using pistons or inflatable rubber bladders had begun. Montblanc got its start when three German partners created the Simplizissiumus-Füllhalter pen company in 1906, which changed its name to Simplo Filler Pen Co. GMBH in 1907, at the same time it moved from Berlin to Hamburg. The company's first pen was the Rouge et Noir safety pen. Safety pens are so-called because they have a retractable nib; when the nib is telescoped into the barrel and the cap screwed down, the pen is sealed against leakage. The Rouge et Noir advertisements played up this angle with an image of a gent in white tie placing a Rouge et Noir pen into a white vest pocket – risky business in 1907.

The first pen to be called "Montblanc" came out in 1910, and had a plain white cap; the distinctive six-pointed Montblanc snowcap appeared in 1913. (It's often thought of as a six-pointed star, but it's actually a stylized representation of the mountain's snowy peak). The name "Meisterstück" was first used in 1924 for flagship fountain pens with a piston filling system, which featured the Montblanc snowcap, and eventually the identification for the public between these high grade pens, and the company, became so strong that in 1934, Montblanc was adopted as the name of the company overall. By that time distribution had exploded; Montblanc sold pens in over sixty countries, supported by extensive advertising campaigns.

The Montblanc snowcap on early Montblanc safety pens.

Montblanc safety pens from the 1920s, with barrels decorated with elaborate gold overlay.

Montblanc at the time was part of a major worldwide industry that included dozens of pen manufacturers. Like mechanical watches, fountain pens could be luxuries and good ones certainly were. But they were also essential tools for business and communication and as with watches, you might have to settle for a lesser one but you still generally tried to get the best you could afford. Vulcanized rubber (which is also called ebonite; materials euphemisms in luxury go back further than many of us think) was gradually replaced by other materials, most notably the first generation of industrial plastics – celluloid for many years, and then newer thermoplastics, as well as acetate and acrylics – whose hardness, luster, and workability made them ideal for pen barrels. The same improvements in natural and synthetic rubber gaskets that made water resistant watches possible, also made a wider and wider range of filling systems available to the public.

Hamburg was devastated during the war years, and immediately after the armistice pen production moved briefly to Denmark, but Montblanc rebuilt its manufacturing capabilities and distribution networks quickly, and in 1952, the modern Meisterstück model no. 149 was launched. A thick, black, imposing fountain pen with a piston filling system and gold trim, it's the most recognizable writing instrument anyone's ever made, and has been in production, with occasional modifications, ever since.

Postwar Montblanc pens evolved a sleeker silhouette and a new, modern-looking form for fountain pen nibs.

Modern Montblanc

Montblanc today is a company that produces a range of products which in the Richemont Group is pretty much matched only by Cartier in terms of diversity, but of course a major, and indeed essential, part of the company's identity is in the making of fine writing instruments. As with mechanical watches, fountain pens have become increasingly a luxury as they've become less essential to the conduct of daily life, but interestingly enough, Montblanc has seen a significant uptick in its pen sales in recent years. I wonder if the same nostalgia that's the engine behind so many watch sales might be behind this as well.

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Montblanc's writing instruments offerings today include a very wide range of both standard and limited edition pens and the latter are extremely avidly collected. The company will also do completely bespoke pens and over the years, its Creation Privée department has fielded and fulfilled some quite unusual requests, including, believe it or not, a pen for a cigar enthusiast client with a barrel made of actual tobacco leaves, which presented, as you might imagine, some non-trivial technical challenges. I would have bet real money that you couldn't do that in a million years, but where there's a will there is apparently a way.

Montblanc 90th anniversary of Meisterstück limited edition.

A unique Montblanc 149 pen, with cap and barrel set with 4810 diamonds.

A very interesting room at the Montblanc Museum is set aside for limited editions from, among others, its Writers Editions, in which each pen is dedicated to a particular writer (which is a natural enough connection with a pen, heaven knows). For Montblanc collectors who have missing pieces in their pen collections, looking around this exhibition can be an exercise in frustration with a capital F, because that one pen you need to fill a critical gap is right there – so close, yet so far – but it's still quite cool to see them all together. Each pen is in a vitrine with a sample of correspondence from each writer so you can see what their handwriting looked like. The letter from Ernest Hemingway is a bit on the salty side (he is writing about an "unnamed bitch").

Montblanc Writers Editions "Earnest Hemingway" (the design is derived from a Montblanc Meisterstück from the 1930s)

The Writers Editions "Franz Kafka."

It's intriguing to see how various literary works have influenced the design of the pens. Sometimes it's very straightforward, but others are more subtle – the Franz Kafka, for instance, has a barrel that tapers from a round to a square cross-section, which is a nod to his Metamorphosis.

Nib Making At Montblanc

The nib is the place where pen meets paper and where ink is delivered, and as you can imagine, your experience when using a fountain pen is heavily dependent on the characteristics of the fountain pen nib. There are dozens of different possibilities in terms of the tip shape, flexibility, and writing angle for which a nib is designed, and in the days when pens were used in daily life, for everything from personal correspondence to journalism to stenography, to making carbon copies, pen makers around the world made a truly bewildering variety (which is one of the things that makes collecting vintage pens so much fun). Nowadays, there are very few companies left that make their own nibs, and Montblanc is one of them.

Gold ribbon stock, from which nib blanks are stamped.

This is how a nib starts out: a ribbon of gold, from which the basic form of the nib is stamped in a machine that can apply up to 20 tons of pressure. There are a huge variety of nib shapes made at Montblanc, but this is how they all begin. Each coiled ribbon of gold weighs about 7.5 kilos – enough gold for several thousand nibs. Once a ribbon is used up it's melted down and the gold recovered for further use.

A nib for a Meisterstück pen as it emerges from the press.

After the nib has been stamped out, there are quite a few further production steps, including engraving, plating with rhodium – for instance, for the two-tone nib of a 149 – and welding the tipping material onto the nib. The tipping material, as we've already mentioned, is usually a combination of various metals from the platinum family. The reason for using these metals is that they have excellent resistance to abrasion (a property which makes them extremely hard to machine, but very good for things like jewelry and watch cases) . The use of such materials for nib tips is essential for creating a pen that can be used for many years and in my own collection, there are pens from the 1920s and 1930s with iridium tips that write just as well now as they did ninety or a hundred years ago. One of the beauties of well-made pens is that, like a good mechanical watch, they seem capable, with care, of lasting essentially indefinitely. Originally, pure iridium was used, which is meteoric in origin, but nowadays alloys allow for better materials control than meteoric iridium.

The business end of a Montblanc 149 fountain pen (property of the author). This tiny hemisphere of hand-polished osmium-iridium alloy has an outsized role to play in determining how a pen writes.

One of the most interesting operations to watch is the cutting of the nib slit. The slit is essential as it feeds ink, via capillary flow, from the vented feed under the nib to the tip, and it also gives the nib flexibility. The cutting operation is done with a graphite disk that's impregnated with diamond. The gold from which the body of the nib is made is easy to cut but platinum family metals are quite dense and tough, and when the disk meets the tip of the nib, you get a startling little jet of fire.

The moment that the diamond-edged cutting wheel begins cutting through the hard osmium-iridium alloy tip.

The single most critical operation, however, is polishing the tipping material, which is done to ensure you get a smooth writing experience at every angle. Doing this is a manual operation and it takes years to really become proficient at it. The nib is swept over the polishing cylinders in an hypnotic figure 8 pattern, and the craftsperson doing the polishing inspects the results repeatedly. This hand polishing, like the other nib manufacturing processes, is the same for every fountain pen made at Montblanc, whether it's a six figure unique piece or a standard issue Meisterstück.

Once a nib is completed, the final step is a writing test. As with the polishing of tipping material, a writing test is performed on every nib that Montblanc manufactures. The figure 8 pattern used by the polisher is duplicated in the writing test. It's a challenging skill to master, as the evaluation of the feel of each nib is highly subjective and very influenced by the emotional state of the person performing the test. Come in off a great weekend skiing, and every nib feels great; come in off a nasty spat with your spouse, and you're in an unforgiving mood. Where you are in your workflow also influences how you evaluate a nib; if you've just been testing a batch of double-broads, fine nibs feel extra-scratchy at first. The paper used for the test is plain A4 paper, the idea being to test pens on something similar to what they'll encounter once they go out into the world.

An interesting side note is that it's something of an article of faith among pen enthusiasts that nibs "break in" to a person's individual writing style and this broken in pen shouldn't be lent to others, as this might lead to the nib losing its special characteristics. We asked the head of Montblanc's nib department, and were told that while they don't break in, in the sense of the nib reshaping itself to a particular person's hand, that it is true that lending out a fountain pen poses some risks – the example given was lending a pen to someone who usually writes with an oblique nib. This could result, over time, in a change in the width of the tines of the nib, which would make the feel of the pen more scratchy.

Montblanc's Bespoke Nib Service

A logical evolution to having the ability to make fountain pen nibs in-house, is the creation of a bespoke nib service. Montblanc has been offering this at its boutiques since 2012, although its Creation Privée department will make one-off custom nibs as part of its bespoke pen creations as well. The bespoke nib service is oriented around making a nib that's customized for your personal style of writing – people handle pens in ways that are extremely idiosyncratic and while the standard assortment of available styles can produce a "good enough" writing experience, the more specific the shape and other characteristics of a nib can be made to the individual, the better.

The standard repertoire of nibs consists of four sizes: extra fine, fine, medium, and broad. People who write in a small, rapid hand are often happier with a finer nib; medium is, well, a happy medium; broad nibs are good for those who write in a larger hand, or will use their pen mostly for signatures. The bespoke nib service, on the other hand, begins by matching you with a much wider assortment of nibs, which including a variety of extra broad and oblique nibs. The double broad and oblique nibs offer a rather calligraphic look to one's writing, as the horizontal strokes will be much narrower than the vertical, thanks to the shape of the tipping material.

The process of evaluating your handwriting is fairly straightforward. You write a test sentence, using a specially designed pen, on a pressure-sensitive pad; the pen is equipped with a wireless motion sensor that evaluates five factors. These are writing pressure, speed, angle, pen rotation, and swing. Once you're done writing your test sentence, a software package crunches the numbers and generates a data plot of how you write, and a recommendation is made for the type of nib that best suits your writing style.

It is actually a distinctly strange sensation – handwriting is very personal and you feel almost as you would in a doctor's office, answering probing questions from a stranger. Handwriting is something about which many people are a bit self-conscious, and in an odd way, it has become something much more private than it used to be. With so much correspondence taking place digitally, and moreover filtered through the inevitable depersonalization created by social media, handwriting – that most intimate and ancient form of communication – has become something few of us ever see, and our own is seen with decreasing frequency by others.

However, writing with a fountain pen offers an antidote to the leveling effect of digital communication, and even writing with a test pen better suited to my own writing habits (for the record, right oblique fine, for which I'd request a bit of flex) was a revelation. There is a joyful ease and sense of clarity in expression that the right pen can create, and though the cost of the bespoke nib service (€1400, with a wait of about six weeks to produce) may seem frivolous, it's one of the cheapest ways I can think of to experience a really meaningful luxury.